In the geo-political world of 2014, there are two countries that stand in the forefront of Communist regimes. One would expect that with similar systems of governance, both countries would imitate, or begin to imitate, one another. The policies that deal with human rights, poverty, education, and hunger should be similar, if not the same. In the Western world where democracy is preached and practiced, the living standards and labor conditions are comparable. Just as the fatalities are low in the factories of Western Europe, they are just as low in America. Two countries with similar governments, on paper and in practice, should enforce similar policies. Ironically, two of the few Communist regimes in the world today could not be more different. China and North Korea each adopted the same style of government, yet China is ranked third in the world for GDP versus North Korea’s lousy ranking of one hundred six. With two countries that have such strong ties, it is nonsensical for them to be so different. It is for that reason the source of such disparity is the differing hunger and poverty policies. The reason North Korea has failed to progress in the past seven decades is because their policy for hunger ignores or exacerbates the issue. Economic progression requires those who are a part of the economic cycle to be productive and knowledgeable enough to make sound decisions. Both China and North Korea have strong literacy rates and sound education policies, but if the students are too busy worrying about their next meal, then the acquired knowledge will not be utilized to its full extent.
The legislative side of China’s government was much like the start up of many other developed nations. First there was a trickle of...
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Today, China and North Korea are two extremely powerful communist countries. However, communism was not always present. In fact, communism was a new political theory proposed and published on February 21st of 1848 by Karl Marx in his famous “Communist Manifesto.” In 1949, approximately one hundred years after the Communist Manifesto was written, Mao Zedong came into power and henceforth, adopted a form of communism. It was after World War II and the Chinese Civil War, that the Chinese Communists were able to overthrow Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party; hence, this new government swore to form a “brand new” China, which modeled and resembled closely to Marxism-Leninism. North Korea and China’s geography, mutual history, and ideology proved to make them similar in many aspects in terms of reforms and revolutions; however, it was not until death of Mao Zedong and the rise of Deng Xiao Ping in the mid-1970s that drew the distinct line between North Korea and China communism.
What do you think of when you hear the word “famine”? Do you think of natural disasters, of unpredictable tragedy, of innocent lives lost? Tragedy and death are inherent to the concept of starvation on a large scale, but the nature of some famines may have as much to do with politics as it does with the environment. What I expected to uncover as I began my research on the 1994-98 famine in North Korea was food shortages on a massive scale as a result of terrible growing conditions, extreme climates, unpredictable and unpreventable circumstances, for the most part. Admittedly, my knowledge of famine was limited to what I knew of the countryside of pre-communist China, where the most sustenance provided by the land the bare minimum was, and any number of external changes negatively effecting growth of or access to crops could equal devastation for entire regions. With that as my frame of reference, I was surprised by the uniquely political circumstances behind the famine in North Korea. The famine that killed 2-3 million in the 1990's was more closely tied to its independence from the southern half of the Korean peninsula it had once shared, to the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, than to any singular natural disaster. The millions that died did so as a result of their government prioritizing its independence over their survival, its budget over their sustenance. North Korea's famine was born of 1950's conflict, fueled by 1990's politics, and sustained by human error and hubris from within.
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Disruptive politics for China were presenting themselves since the death of the CCPs former leader Mao Zedong in 1976. There was two years of great uncertainty until Deng Xiaoping's take of government was developed in 1978; he had also focused on gr...
Hunger is a problem worldwide. However with a quarter of North Korea’s population (six million people) starving or malnourished, with nearly one million of those cases being children under the age of five years old, the situation is especially dire (Cullinane 3). Throughout history the term “famine” has referred to a shortage of food caused by uncontrollable circumstances. Modern famines are relatively nonexistent because international aid, globalization, and modern domestic responses are all able to provide a safety net for those in need of assistance. In reality, mass-starvations today are caused by government decisions and improper food distribution. The North Korean government controls food delivery through a Public Distribution System (PDS), on which 62 percent of the population is entirely reliant upon for monthly or biweekly rations (Haggard et al. 17). To put this dependency in perspective, by the end of the 1990’s the PDS could barely support six percent of the population (Haggard et al. 28). In the 1990’s those who lived in the Northeastern Hamgyong provinces, a region historically rebellious due to mountain ranges and proximity to China, were cut off from the PDS (Nastios 109). With regime control of food distribution, crea...
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When the new Chinese Government was set up in 1949, the new government faced a lot of problems. First on their agenda was how to re-build the country. As Communist Party of China (CPC) is a socialist party, their policies at the time were similar to that of the Soviet Union’s. Consequently, the CPC used a centrally planned strategy as its economic strategy when it first began. For a long time, the Chinese economy was a centrally planned economy in which none other than the state owned all companies. In fact, there were absolutely no entrepreneurs. As time went on, the problems of a centrally planned economy started to appear, such as low productivity, which was the key reason for restricting the development of China. With the population growing, the limitations of the centrally planned economy were clear. In 1978 China started its economic reform whose goal was to generate sufficient surplus value to finance the modernization of the Chinese economy. In the beginning, in the late 1970s and early 19...
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